"Time is always guilty": Narratives of Modernity in Interwar Detective Fiction

abstract: This essay explores representations of modernity in interwar detective fiction in Britain. It argues that Agatha Christie's Poirot novels break with the classical function of detective fiction by highlighting an unmasterable disorder behind the apparent regularity of modernity; and that the conservative tendencies commonly perceived in those novels were, paradoxically, much more prominently exhibited in detective fiction by politically "progressive" authors. The essay concludes by conducting a "parageneric" reading of a wider field of texts in accordance with the norms and conventions of detective fiction, to demonstrate the larger significance of these issues within mid-century North Atlantic intellectual culture.